Straightening out Social Services

Vouchers, Universal Basic Income, Something Different?

Feb 02, 2024

Three years ago, when my younger son finished high school, I had no plans for him. With high functioning autism and epilepsy, he was too smart for a day program, had too many medical and social issues for a job, and wasn’t ready for a traditional college. The school was no help. A consultant charged me $800 and recommended three programs that I could have found with a google search. I was pretty much on my own.

So, I did what I always do. I researched the hell out of the problem. Now, I have a path for my kid and a new career for myself.

One of my strategies for Ian was to plan for both the best case and worst case scenarios. In Ian’s case, the worst case scenario was never being able to be employed and needing total support from the state. So, I filled out all the paperwork for the state - a horrible process that took over three years - and now Ian doesn’t have to work. He has a universal basic income.

I hope my son works. Work makes me so happy that I have just added another career to my plate. And my son loves work, too. He spends hours every day teaching himself some new techie thing that goes over my head. Last summer he taught himself how to build his own computer by watching YouTube videos, bought all the parts from Amazon using birthday gift cards, and built it. And it works great.

Ian would like to work behind the scenes at the Geek Squad at Best Buy fixing your computer. I’m fairly certain that he can reach that goal. He’s enrolled in an online computer school and taking classes at the local community college, so he’ll have the right credentials. To improve his employability, he attends two or three social skill groups per week. He’s doing great — like amazingly great — in all areas, but I’m a girl who likes Plan Bs, so I also planned for a future without employment and utter dependency.

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Autistic people have a terrible rates of unemployment. Something like 85% of people with autism never find work, even those who finish college, because they can’t get past the job interview with their shabby social skills.

Big companies are trying to increase the employment of the neurodiverse with many reforms, including shaking up the traditional job interview process. Instead of asking dumb questions that favor people who know how to lie, HR folks dump a box of Legos on a table and say “build something.” But there aren’t enough of those enlightened jobs for everyone, so fallback plans are very much necessary.

I spent three years filling out disability paperwork for Ian to get him enrolled in both the federal and state system of disability. I just tapped into another bucket of money this month. In the future, I will apply for housing vouchers and food stamps for him, so he can live totally independently if he wants. I don’t want to give out the numbers, but Ian has some security for the future.

We’re also dumping money that we would have spent on a college education into long-term, high risk mutual funds. More security.

Fun fact: Four years of private college costs $320,000. Minimum. If you put that money in a mutual fund earning 6% per year, there will be $3 million in that account in forty years.

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In the past, the state put people like Ian in an institution. Today, they give the money to the families, who either purchase private services or pay themselves to do the caretaking. Sounds good? Well, it’s not a perfect system.

In a perfect world, the state would create great work and social opportunities for people with disabilities. In my utopia, there would be walkable communities, full time jobs for all, and community spaces for recreation and common meals. A hippie at heart, I want chicken coops and naked babies running around. That doesn’t exist.

In a perfect world, people wouldn’t need a PhD to figure out the complex system of payments. For years, I seriously watched two webinars per week from various do-good organizations to figure everything out. Just yesterday afternoon, I explained to a mom of a 20-year old girl with Down’s syndrome about the benefits for her daughter. She had no idea.

In a perfect world, the system wouldn’t hinge on parents with plenty of energy and stamina implementing a program for them. There are some families that take those checks, but don’t actually do anything for their disabled person, because they have their own mental health issues. I imagine that there are some very bad situations out there.

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Despite this system, which is both flawed and generous at the same time, the fact remains — there are some people who are unemployable. Some might be autistic young men living in suburbs. Others are undiagnosed autistic and schizophrenic people living in tents along the side of the highway. Others are hooked on fentanyl in a heap on the street. We’ve got busloads of migrants coming into the country. Some are lost in a cloud of depression and can’t stay employed. Others are in professions that will get wiped away in the AI future.

Alright, since I’m a rambling mood, let’s talk about social services for migrant families. A few years ago, I interviewed a professor at the education school at Columbia for an article that I was doing on trauma. This professor, who specialized in migrant families, said that the children coming into our country are dealing with massive trauma. Many of them had seen or experienced horrific events on the way into this country.

So, the traumatized children enter our school system. They don’t speak English and were probably never even educated in their home countries in their own language. Now, they can’t focus on school work, because their brains are processing the trauma. They might have behavioral issues related to the trauma. They are living in rotating shelters and are being bumped around from school to school. Because of the learning and trauma issues, they qualify for IEPs, so the schools have to pay for psychological services and specialized learning classes.

I’m just spitballing numbers here, but I would guess that local school districts are suddenly paying for education services that cost $50,000-$60,000 per kid. If the student’s problems can’t be handled in a regular public school, then that number is higher.

After you add in services for housing, food, and so on for the 157,000 asylum seekers just in New York City, the numbers get seriously big. The city estimates the influx of migrants will cost $12 billion over three years.

Social services are expensive. Providing people with a decent education, food, housing, and childcare is never going to be cheap. But there are definitely ways that we could be doing it better and more efficiently. I’m not so arrogant as to believe that I can solve this problem in a little newsletter. But I do think we have to have these discussions.